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31 December 2009

NYE

2009, for us, has been the Year of Change. We started off the year making use of our winter break at Illinois by readying the house for the market. In between we have a) sold a house; b) purchased a house; c) moved all of our things from point a to point b; d) gotten ourselves pregnant; e) started new jobs; f) finished our first semesters.

My first semester here at Penn State is a blur of weekends spent mostly in other cities, in my attempt to clear out all the travel for the end of (d) above. This included a few talks, a conference or two, and two dissertation defenses back in C-U. Weekdays are a blur of hard-charging spinning classes at my new gym; childbirth classes that ran way too late in the evening; graduate seminars that were simultaneously exhilerating and exhausting (this latter mostly because of the time of the seminar and my hellacious travel schedule); and appointments with doctors.

The year is about all I can manage. To look back on the decade would mean to reflect on even more head-spinning change. Ten years ago today I was hunkering in the Poconos with a case of wine, 5 gallon-jugs of water and a small handful of grad-school friends, recovering from MLA and the plague it brought and wondering whether the compooters of the world would all stop working. 2000 was the year I got Jada and my PhD and left here to take my very first academic job; and it was the year before I ripped a giant hole in my knee mountain biking and (not entirely unrelatedly, actually) JM and I got together. We added little Tillie Fry about halfway through, in 2005, after our year in Pittsburgh.

And now we will be starting off this year, this decade, making way for a new little family member, whom I am very much looking forward to meeting. Happy new year, everybody.

Comments

NYE

2009, for us, has been the Year of Change. We started off the year making use of our winter break at Illinois by readying the house for the market. In between we have a) sold a house; b) purchased a house; c) moved all of our things from point a to point b; d) gotten ourselves pregnant; e) started new jobs; f) finished our first semesters.

My first semester here at Penn State is a blur of weekends spent mostly in other cities, in my attempt to clear out all the travel for the end of (d) above. This included a few talks, a conference or two, and two dissertation defenses back in C-U. Weekdays are a blur of hard-charging spinning classes at my new gym; childbirth classes that ran way too late in the evening; graduate seminars that were simultaneously exhilerating and exhausting (this latter mostly because of the time of the seminar and my hellacious travel schedule); and appointments with doctors.

The year is about all I can manage. To look back on the decade would mean to reflect on even more head-spinning change. Ten years ago today I was hunkering in the Poconos with a case of wine, 5 gallon-jugs of water and a small handful of grad-school friends, recovering from MLA and the plague it brought and wondering whether the compooters of the world would all stop working. 2000 was the year I got Jada and my PhD and left here to take my very first academic job; and it was the year before I ripped a giant hole in my knee mountain biking and (not entirely unrelatedly, actually) JM and I got together. We added little Tillie Fry about halfway through, in 2005, after our year in Pittsburgh.

And now we will be starting off this year, this decade, making way for a new little family member, whom I am very much looking forward to meeting. Happy new year, everybody.